Deadly Ground

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For now, however, the region must make do with makeshift solutions. To be effective in the long run, the countries rimming the Indian Ocean need a system that can determine not only when a tsunami might occur, but also when it won't, so that warnings can be issued judiciously. In Thailand, Sri Lanka and India, hundreds of thousands of people spent hours waiting for a tsunami that never came. In Nias, the fear of a tsunami probably cost many lives of people who were trapped in rubble because their relatives had headed for high ground. The local government was paralyzed from the start. "The officials were in a panic that there would be another tsunami," says Bachtiar Chamsjah, Indonesia's Minister for Social Affairs. "They all left their work." Some locals who fled to higher ground came to regret it for another reason. Housewife Yohanna Duha and her 20-year-old daughter ran to the hills after the earthquake. When they returned home in the morning, their house was damaged but standing, and looters had taken everything they could—"every penny I had in my drawer," says Duha, "and the cell phones we left when we ran for safety."

In the Pacific, deep-ocean pressure sensors are able to measure passing tsunamis, and coastal gauges take water-level measurements that are relayed in real time to a region-wide warning center. Nothing like that exists in the Indian Ocean. The U.N.'s International Oceanographic Commission is now working on creating an independent regional warning system that it hopes to have installed by the end of 2006. But that may prove difficult. The system will be expensive to establish and maintain, and pledges from donor countries in the tsunami's aftermath have not materialized. India has balked at the idea of an open exchange of data, fearing that nuclear secrets could be revealed. Meanwhile, competition between Indonesia and Thailand to host the warning center has led to an impasse. "We can't wait for these countries to make up their minds," says Thailand's Dharmmasaroj, "so we are setting up our own national warning center." If a system does get off the ground by the end of next year, it will not be a moment too soon. "We don't want to be guessing again," says Hirshorn, the Hawaii-based geophysicist. "If it happens next week, we just won't have any idea: maybe no tsunami, maybe a tsunami—who knows?"

For Nias, which sits near a fault line, no early-warning system is likely to be fast enough. Last week, 30-year-old construction consultant Yason Waru and his cousin Darni were sifting through the pile of rubble that was once their house. Built just a year ago, it was reduced to a 3-m-high heap of bricks, zinc roofing and chunks of cement in less than five minutes. "When the quake hit we had no time to save anything but ourselves," says Waru. Certainly, they received no earthquake warning from local officials. Because the reality is, it's still impossible to predict with any accuracy when the earth's plates will shift, triggering a quake. All the same, seismologist McCloskey believes the omens aren't good. He says the stress that brought about the two massive convulsions of the past three months has still not been relieved and has simply shifted farther south along the fault line. That means another massive temblor is not out of the question. "We dearly hope we are wrong," says McCloskey. Asia's challenge: to be better prepared in case he's not.